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| Mahavishnu Orchestra "Inner Worlds": Track-By-Track
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"All In The Family", the album's opener, must refer to the family of rhythms, starting as it does with a percolating samba school beat, with a bit of bass marimba whipped in for extra-Caribbean effect. Stu Goldberg (one of the first professional jazz musicians to come along with a degree in jazz studies) is heard here on organ (recalling Lifetime), while McLaughlin rips off a stereo tour de force, trading hard and nasty jazz-rock guitar solos on one speaker with liquid guitar synthesizer solos on the other. The influence of John Coltrane looms large--if one wonders what separates the jazz fusion of the '70s with the "contemporary jazz" of today, the influence of Coltrane might be the answer.
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"Miles Out"--payback, perhaps, for "John McLaughlin"--begins with hand claps, takes off with jet noise via McLaughlin's 360 systems frequency shifter, settles into a light a light '70s funk groove and then heads into some all-circuits-out electronic jamming that recalls the outer space funk travels of George Clinton.
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"In My Life", a McLaughlin-Walden collaboration, shares a title with a Lennon-McCartney song, but it's closer in spirit to a George Harrison composition ("Thank you Lord, thank you Lord, thank you Lord..." goes a lyric). Walden handles the vocal and McLaughlin switches over to the beautiful 12-string acoustic guitar for a flamenco-ish turn (flamenco, of course, has its roots in India, so McLaughlin's a natural for all of this: in the few years after his album, McLaughlin would tour and record with Shakti, his Indian fusion band, and flamenco virtuoso Paco de Lucia).
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"Gita" also has Walden's vocals, but, again, the highlight of all this is McLaughlin's pealing guitar synthesizer solo, a cry from the heart.
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"Morning Calls" sounds like an old bagpipe ditty. It's a lovely guitar-organ throwaway that throws away Goldberg and Armstrong (Walden handles the organ).
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Walden's "The Way Of The Pilgrim"--with its hooky melody and arena drumming--has the stamp of a big rock and roll anthem; it's rather atypical of the Mahavishnu Orchestra and rather atypical of the album. It does make you miss Narada Michael Walden's drumming skills, however, and makes you wonder why he didn't add a lyric to this.
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There is a lyric on "River Of My Heart", a pretty pop ballad that points to the kind of productions Walden would involve himself in later, but it's so removed from John McLaughlin that, for some reason, he's not even present on the recording.
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Bassist Ralphe Armstrong's "Planetary Citizen" is another bit of mid-'70s naivete--his lyrics, which he sings, include lines like "Love is the answer to all the wars/when we love one another we can open doors"--but it manages to head back into the interplanetary funk waters of George Clinton before it's through.
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"Lotus Feet" is an Eastern waltz with sleigh bells, a simple clean, open beacon of light, the kind of thing that, in the wrong hands, would turn into New Age music in a few years time. In the right hands--John McLaughlin's--it would turn into the post-Mahavishnu Shakti.
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The album closes with the two-part "Inner Worlds", a summing up and a looking forward. It sums up '70s fusion with its instruments--gizmos named E-MU synthesizers, frequency shifters, Steiner-Parker synths and mini-moogs--and in its bubbling stewpot of sounds, styles and influences. Minimalist blips and blaps and space age swirls of sound underpinned by strong funk drumming and the natural sounds of gongs and timpani wrap around John McLaughlin, who says goodbye to the Mahavishnu Orchestra days screaming his virtuosic head off. The Mahavishnu Orchestra of the 1970s had said all it was going to say, and McLaughlin was ready to head into a thousand new, and old, directions.
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